LITTLE ROCK (AP) - Nearly one-fifth of Arkansas' 308 school districts will cease to exist under provisions of the state's first school consolidation law that goes into effect this week.

Sixty-one districts will lose their individual identities, though not necessarily their physical locations, under Act 60, which was passed during this year's special session on education.

The law ordered administrative consolidation of districts with fewer than 350 students, effective July 1. Fifty-seven districts fell below the threshold.

Forty-two of the affected districts are being absorbed into larger existing districts through consolidations or annexations. Twenty-one other districts are consolidating with each other into nine larger districts with new names. Five of the 21 - Acorn, Emerson, Newark, Ola and Rison - were not among the 57 districts affected by the law.

The changes will whittle the number of public school districts to 253 in a restructuring that is part of the Legislature's response to a November 2002 state Supreme Court decision declaring Arkansas' public school funding system unconstitutionally inequit-able and inadequate.

A new $2.7 billion school-funding formula that lawmakers adopted, and expansion of Arkansas' new higher sales tax to previously untaxed services, among $370 million in new taxes that lawmakers passed to pay for school reforms, also go into effect Thursday.

The bulk of new tax revenue comes from a seven-eighths percent increase that raised the state sales tax from 5.125 percent to 6 percent on March 1. On Thursday, the sales tax will be applied to a range of services for the first time, from body piercing, campground rentals and dry cleaning to pet grooming, security system monitoring and wrecker and towing services.

"As always with legislation that's about to go into effect, we spend time making sure we're implementing the laws properly and making the budget adjustments that are required," Gov. Mike Huckabee said in a terse comment that belied his deep opposition to a consolidation plan he dismissed at the time as "embarrassingly lame" and his refusal to support tax increases.

With its unanimous 2002 opinion, the Supreme Court ordered the state to develop remedies that provide equal educational opportunities for all of the state's 450,000 students. Justices recalled their mandate in the case this January when the state failed to meet a New Year's Day deadline to comply with the order.

On June 18, the high court called reforms passed by the Legislature after justices recalled the case "truly impressive," and by a narrow 4-3 majority closed the case despite fears among education advocates that the Legislature would falter in its commitment to implementing landmark reforms without ongoing Supreme Court oversight.

They worried that any new lawsuit filed to force the state to live up to its commitment could take years to resolve, as did the lawsuit on which the court's 2002 decision was based. The tiny Lake View School District sued the state in 1992.

Attorney General Mike Beebe, whose office successfully argued to the court to release jurisdiction of the case, said the high court had done its job and the Legislature should be free to finish the job it has started.

"If there was a wholesale breach of faith or the kind of backsliding some people are afraid of, that might cause .... expeditious (Supreme Court) treatment of any new cause of action," Beebe said. "But everybody's gotten the message and the Legislature has proven that it's gotten the message."

A record 61-day special session that convened Dec. 8 produced sweeping changes to curriculum standards and financial accounting and academic accountability, generated aid to help poor students learn, expanded preschool programs and raised taxes.

Sen. Tim Wooldridge, D-Paragould, chairman of the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee, said he was confident the Legislature met the challenge.

"The two most volatile things we face are dealing with people's children and their money," said Wooldridge, who pressed to keep the sales tax increase under a penny. "We did as best we could at what was in front of us. We meet the challenge and I hope that we ultimately see improvement in our test scores as a result."

The new funding formula establishes an education finance standard of $5,400 per student statewide, sets a new salary schedule for teachers, including an increase in starting pay from $21,500 to $27,500, and also channels about $130 million more annually to districts for programs to help poor children. Districts with the largest concentrations of poor students get the most assistance.

The formula also allocates an additional $40 million annually to the $13 million the state spends for early childhood learning programs that give impoverished preschoolers an early start in learning.

"All that together, I am sincerely confident that we're going to see improvements in our student achievement over time," said state Sen. Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, a leading advocate for education reforms, including consolidation.

"But education reform is like rerouting the Titanic," Argue added. "Many of these measures will take a period of time before they begin to pay dividends."

Navigating education reform is hardly complete.

The demise of the smallest school districts culminates a burning debate that has engulfed every corner of the state since January 2003, when Huckabee proposed merging high schools in districts with fewer than 1,500 students to make costly court-ordered school reforms more affordable.

A rural backlash to the governor's proposal derailed the most sweeping changes in last year's regular session, and the consolidation battle raged during a long summer of scathing rhetoric, the governor's pro-consolidation tour and anti-consolidation meetings around the state - none of which produced a consensus.

The consolidation threshold established during the special session came as a compromise between adversaries who knew additional revenues were needed to improve public schools.

Consolidation supporters opposed higher taxes for education without greater efficiencies in public schools. Rural consolidation opponents resisted raising taxes for school reforms and closing schools at the same time.

Lowering the enrollment limit to 350 carved enough support from both camps to produce Arkansas' first statutory consolidation of schools.

Before the special session, Huckabee said he would support up to a 1-cent sales tax increase but only if the Legislature approved a significant restructuring of school districts to limit the cost of education reforms.

During the session, the governor refused to accept an enrollment limit of less than 500 for consolidation, a figure he said was too low, and refused to support tax increases after his push for broader consolidation failed.

A group of small school districts and their advocates have filed a federal lawsuit to block implementation of Act 60, claiming the law violates patrons' equal protection, due process and civil rights.

U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. recently denied the plaintiff's request for an injunction to prohibit mergers from going into effect this week.

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, former state Sen. Bill Lewellen of Marianna, planned to amend the complaint to address procedural deficiencies that prompted Howard's ruling, and it was unclear how quickly the case would proceed.

Also, inspection teams began this month evaluating 80 million square feet of school buildings in an $8.8 million court-ordered assessment.

Early cost estimates for upgrades to comply with the high court's order to provide substantially equal school buildings and facilities statewide range from $1 billion to $3 billion, though officials say they don't know how much renovations will cost or how the money will be raised.

Legislators will be hard-pressed to raise taxes even more next year to pay for the improvements, and a recalcitrant governor could make the task more difficult.

Huckabee said last week that broader consolidation was inevitable if the Legislature can't find the money to pay for facilities, but he would not say if he would demand more school mergers up front, as he did last year, as a condition for his support of revenue-raising measures, or if he would offer consolidation as a way out in the event of legislative gridlock over tax increases.

Beebe said cooperation would be the better course.

"In light of the uncertainty (over consolidation) and the monumental scope of the whole facilities issue, it is vitally important for the governor and the Legislature to work together to solve this," the attorney general said.